Identifying function words

[Stephen.Bax]

Well, that suggestion has been around for a long while. But the words which [q] attaches to suggests not. About 80% of words starting [q] see the character followed by either [ot] or [ok]. Almost none are followed by [ch] or [sh], or even [r]. The word 'and' should attache to a class of words, specifically nouns, so we would have to propose that [t] and [k] were noun markers. This would put us on a much different path from a natural language, thus destroying the goal of finding functions words, surely?

Hi Emma,

The word "and" may well join adjectives, verbs, or even numerals, but I agree that the major portion should be nouns. I'm not sure why you say that t and k would be noun markers. Would not o be a noun marker in this case? 

I'd say that the task of finding function words extends beyond the natural language approach. It would suit artificial language, and maybe some not very sophisticated ciphers.

Were [o] a noun marker then there would be a high number of words starting [o] which don't take [q] frequently. For example, many words starting [ol] occur but have low rates of [q]. Furthermore, we would still be left with a problem as [ch, sh] don't even take [o] often.

The idea that [q] is a grammatical marker stems from the fact that it appears in the body text and not the labels. Yet I think this is actually a misunderstanding. It seems to not appear in diagrams, including running text which is part of those diagrams. For example, f70r2 has four lines of text running round the outside of the diagram, and there is not one [q] in it (there are instance of [q] in the block alongside).

Curious. But it does in fact occasionally appear in the running text around diagrams, as in these example (including one just two pages earlier f69v);

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But I agree that it does seem rarer in those running texts.

Curiously, I notice that in the last one, f67r1, the example in the running text around the diagram is tantalisingly similar to the example in the text above the diagram

Running text:
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Could be read as: qoikeey ?

Text above diagram:
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Could also be read as: qoikeey ?